About Scope Energy NYC
Scope Energy NYC is a Local Law 97 advisory practice for New York City co-op and condo boards — the pre-war, middle-class, Class B and C buildings that the large sustainability consultancies were never designed to serve.
Why we exist
The engineering and ESG firms that dominate Local Law 97 work built their practices around institutional portfolios — commercial landlords with capital planning teams, sustainability directors, and seven-figure retrofit budgets.
Their proposals assume that client. The deliverables are dense audit reports and multi-year capital plans with six-figure line items, produced for people whose job it is to read them.
A volunteer board treasurer in a 200-unit co-op in Queens is not that person. They have a day job. They have a reserve fund that's already thin and shareholders who will push back hard on a $2,000 assessment. When a report like that lands on the board table, it doesn't enable a decision — it paralyzes the room.
So the buildings that need help most get the least. They're too small to be interesting to the institutional firms, too complex for a managing agent stretched across thirty properties, and too consensus-bound to move on their own.
That gap is the entire reason this practice exists.
Co-op and condo boards don't operate like corporate real estate. Every meaningful decision needs a vote, an assessment, or a reserve drawdown — often with retirees and working families pushing back. We write deliverables to be voted on: a clear recommendation, the cost, the penalty avoided, the funding path, and the reasoning documented well enough to defend if a shareholder challenges it two years later.
Right now a self-managed building has to separately find an energy auditor, a benchmarking service, a REC broker, contractors, and someone who understands C-PACE eligibility — with no staff to coordinate any of it. We are one relationship instead of five — including running REC sourcing and structuring ourselves rather than handing you off to another vendor. Reducing the coordination burden on volunteers is not a side benefit; it's most of the product.
RECs offset Scope 2 electricity, not on-site combustion — that's just how the DOB rules work, and we'll always tell you exactly what a purchase covers for your building. But unlike a certificate broker, we don't stop at explaining it: we source certificates from the Zone J and Tier 4 market and structure bespoke arrangements, sequenced alongside your retrofit and filing work as one coordinated plan.
What we believe
Most buildings don't have an accurate picture of their own emissions. Until that's right, every downstream decision is a guess with a large price tag attached.
The same three retrofits — or a REC purchase timed against them — done in a different order, can differ by six figures in net cost. Order is where the money is.
LL97 marketing runs on penalty anxiety. Anxiety makes boards table decisions, not make them. We'd rather hand a board a plan they can act on than a number that frightens them into another quarter of delay.
We take no commission from contractors, equipment vendors or certificate brokers. When we say a quote is padded, we don't benefit from the alternative. That independence is the whole basis of the advice.
Send us an address, or take thirty minutes and we'll walk through where you stand. Free, and with no expectation that you hire anyone.